Amy King


As If A Lantern In Love Led

Like you I have
forgotten everything
spoken so far,
I knew the dinosaurs
in their history
and I have a complex tie
that longs to be subtracted.
All together, we make each other
up. I gave you
a little slice of heartache
to latch onto
& a sixty-pound cumulous cloud
cools her way
straight to the top.
Bashfully enamored eyes
descend as we speak
silently above
the moonlit stove of midnight.


I Too Am Chicken

An author thinks she knows more than
she does. She knows even less.
For example, someone else wrote this.
Thoughts approach in the shower;
she watches them haunt her swirling tides.
That’s the cliché declarative.
She thinks,
Whenever I exist, people name me at the gate;
I trip over my own grass velvet heart
and I am the only person left on this flight.
In the distance, I see no one who can take
off and no perfect landing.
Alas, her red robin eyes to and fro
twitch lightly in their sockets.


A Final Note

There is a deliberate pleasure in watching
someone smoke cigarettes. Even the echo
of that sentence smells like a stolen observation
that the smoker is deeply, darkly thinking.
In books, they brood; on screen, they are the rebel
or daring victim being slowly, unknowingly undone.
I have always wanted to occupy my mouth
in similar fashion and gather great thoughts
from the shadowed glow erasing my face.
I suckle sweet cigar substitutes instead:
savor the proximity of nature we’re taught.
Toast the lung in all its sanctity and encourage
its diverse role within ourselves. As always,
let the credits scroll down your face
before stubbing out the coal.


The Spirit Is Near

Wrapped in personal pity, betrayer sphinx slinks
and eats; he privately shuffles our motivations.
I like the capability of my eyes, the way they
brighten the woman on the curb by the church.
She will burst alive in two minutes. You cannot
believe the wind last night. The things it sells.
The sun buffs the surface of technology across
our city of cracks and cataracts, which in turnig
nores the shoes rubbing my feet from their bones.
Enter some disease where the woman sells
her tears prior to civilization. That moment is now
upon the funeral pyre. In the crumblings & ramblings
of old men seated in tired t-shirts on stoopsever
lasting, they survey remainders of wars over-lived
and fat berries beyond the perimeter ripened
with blood brought back from dust fields
by worms underfoot and pregnant.
We make wine to toast the cross and tender liars.

-All poems previously published at Poetry X